Soul Food offers typical Italian food and vegan and vegetarian options.

Ed eats

Soul Food
78, Merchants Street,
Valletta.
Tel: 9992 2599

Food: 7/10
Service: 7/10
Ambience: 7/10
Value: 6/10
Overall: 7/10

After a week away from the islands, revelling in the wonders of civilisation that the first world brings with it, I couldn’t bring myself to settle back into the confines of an office. The strange thing about this is that I love what I do by day. I just wasn’t ready to face the daily grind of battling traffic, bouncing around the poor excuse for roads and hunting for decent food at lunchtime.

So I figured I should spend a little while being a tourist in my own country. This is inevitably something of a shock because trying this for a couple of days shows you what tourists who visit us have to put up with.

Traipsing around in shorts, camera bag on my back and pink from five minutes of sunshine, I was mistaken for a tourist many times. Half of these times I was delighted with the service I was offered. The other half I was horrified. I suppose it all balances out in the end.

I even took the ferry from Sliema to Valletta on one of my expeditions and I’m happy to report that it is indeed an infinitely preferable way of getting to the city. The service is regular, rapid and really quite inexpensive and approaching Marsamxett by sea is a sight that beats trying to park in Valletta.

As the bells struck two of the afternoon clock, my stomach protested loudly. What’s all this walking around, it asked, without so much as a sandwich since noon? I ducked through the last remaining stalls on Merchants Street, which were well into being dismantled and loaded into a variety of vans that were deftly driven between pedestrians, bits of stall, boxes of stock and bistro tables.

I picked a safe spot at a little place called Soul Food. The name sealed my choice. It is pleasantly comforting and, after a week of eating out three times a day, I thought it sounded vaguely healthy. Not that my conscience ever wins a battle with my stomach.

The menu is interesting. There’s a whole lot of typical Italian food and a list of vegan and vegetarian options. This is great. Most restaurants do one or the other, either leaving vegetarians to pick through the menu for dishes that match their choice of diet or catering exclusively to vegetarians. I was in the company of someone who can’t eat wheat and something told me we’d be safe here.

Her choice was easy. The vegan burger, that even offers a choice of three different vegan patties, is available with gluten-free bread and this normally means that wheat wasn’t used in the first place.

As I stood inside trying to figure out what one does to place an order, I saw a lady at the preparation counter rolling out dough. I am naturally suspicious of the mention of fresh pasta on the menu but seeing this sealed my choice. Even if she wasn’t rolling out a sheet of pasta, this showed that they prepare food to order.

The little sheet of paper on our table with the day’s specialities included a dish with Nduja, the spicy sausage from Calabria, in a tomato sauce. Just what the doctor ordered. I ordered mine and, when asked what size dish I wanted, I ordered the small portion.

We added a couple of glasses of orange juice to the order and, as you can imagine, I was the one who quickly adjusted his choice and said, “me too”, when my sensible lunch companion ordered hers. I’m sure I reacted quickly enough to sound like I felt like orange juice since we arrived.

The market dismantling reached fever pitch by this time. By fever pitch I mean the clanging of metal pipes that are used as stall structures being chucked on to more metal pipes had reached spitting distance from where we were sitting. It wasn’t the pipes I was worried about. It’s the spitting.

I’d seen a sign saying there was more seating upstairs so I ran up to take a look. The entire room upstairs was taken up by a single table with a group of people so I quickly ran back down to my table, deciding to let fate choose what part of the market would get me first.

Music from Soul Food was playing through two tiny speakers that are aimed at the road outside, so a playlist by the Beatles on Spotify sounded annoyingly shrill. And if you’re playing music for public consumption, a free account just doesn’t cut it. I thought of leaving a note, suggesting that they take some of the money I was paying for my pasta dish and pay for a month of ad-free Spotify. Then I figured they’ll likely read the newspaper.

I was noticing all this detail because half an hour later I still had no food. At one point, the young lady, who had taken our order, apologised for the delay and explained that they had a table of 14 upstairs and that they’d ordered all at once. Fifteen minutes later, our food finally made it.

The burger looked the part and the chickpea patty was thick and quite tasty but the bun had been toasted a while before, so biting into the burger turned out to be quite a dry mouthful that had been taken over by the taste of toasted bread. My pasta portion was quite small but the sauce was lovely in its simplicity and made very good use of excellent ingredients. I described my dish as such and the reaction was a simple question. Was it worth the wait? Nothing short of a unicorn steak could be worth a 45-minute wait, was my quick reply, but I was enjoying it and by the end of the dish, I’d almost forgiven the slow service.

The girls were friendly and polite, mixing Italian and English quite cheerfully while working at an incredible pace to cope with what seemed to be more than their capacity.

We bravely ordered two coffees, thinking that the Italians who run the place would surely prepare a coffee that would make up for a short wait.

Coffee was served almost instantly, however, and my espresso cup had been filled to the brim. It was predictably dilute and quite awful when I’d expected an Italian job. I paid €24 for the lot and made my way back to the ferry.

A couple of days later, when I couldn’t possibly shirk duty anymore, I found myself in Valletta at lunchtime. I met a couple of friends there, one of whom suggested Soul Food. I agreed immediately and could find out whether our slow service was an exception. I also wanted to try their piadina. I saw several being served during my wait and this was an excellent opportunity to try one.

My pasta portion was quite small but the sauce was lovely in its simplicity and made very good use of excellent ingredients

This time around, I decided to time the service. Our piadine were served exactly 10 minutes after we’d ordered them. I’d evidently been unlucky the first time. My piadina was named after the Dolomiti and was filled with speck, brie and rucola. This was just perfect with the pastry thin and crisp and fresh and the combination of ingredients designed to sooth your soul.

I wasn’t that thrilled with the one named after Florence because, while I loved the cotto inside, I wasn’t happy to have mushrooms that were sottolio before being popped into the piadina. The man who’d ordered it knew about the mushrooms because he’d had it before and loved it. Who am I to argue?

Once again we finished with espressos and once again there was too much liquid in the cup. This time we paid less than a tenner each though, with the piadina being a more economical lunchtime choice.

And so my soul languishes about in limbo. The food was occasionally heavenly and while they might not be angels, the girls who took care of us were eternally gracious. The wait can be tedious though, and the coffee as dark and long as sin. With a little atonement, however, Soul Food can quite easily live up to its name.

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